Many devices, such as digital cameras, personal digital assistants, laptop computers, and hand held document scanners, have the ability to collect many different images or documents from a variety of sources. In many cases the user may want to accomplish different tasks with each image or document captured. Some may be faxed or e-mailed to business associates or friends. Others may become part of a word processing document. Still others may need to be stored in a specific location. Normally, such devices are periodically connected to a personal computer, and the collected image data files or document data files are copied to the personal computer from the device as a group, or copied individually to the personal computer. In either case, the user must look at each specific image data file or document data file after copying and take action to have that image or document processed or sent to the right place: save image A in this format here; save document B in that format there; attach image C to an e-mail message; fax document D to a business associate, etc. This can be a very time consuming process, especially if a large number of image data files and document data files have been captured. In addition, if the images and documents are collected over an extended period of time, such as on a business trip, by the time the individual copies them to the personal computer for processing and routing, the individual may have difficulty remembering exactly what action was intended for each one. The best time, in most cases, for an individual to determine the disposition of a captured image or document is at the time of capture.
It is thus apparent that there is a need in the art for an improved method or apparatus which will enable a user to annotate a captured image or document, at the time of capture, with voice disposition commands for processing and disposing of the image or document, so that upon copying, or uploading, the image data file or document data file to a personal computer, the image data file or document data file will automatically be processed and disposed of according to the voice disposition commands stored in a voice command annotation file. The present invention meets these and other needs in the art.